So long as the procession kept to the highway of the Bayswater Road,
it retained the foot's-pace, but, turning into less important
thorough-fares, it soon broke into a trot, and so proceeded, with
intervals of walking in the more fashionable streets, until it arrived.
In the first carriage old Jolyon and Nicholas were talking of their
wills. In the second the twins, after a single attempt, had lapsed into
complete silence; both were rather deaf, and the exertion of making
themselves heard was too great. Only once James broke this silence:
"I shall have to be looking about for some ground somewhere. What
arrangements have you made, Swithin?"
And Swithin, fixing him with a dreadful stare, answered:
"Don't talk to me about such things!"
In the third carriage a disjointed conversation was carried on in the
intervals of looking out to see how far they had got, George remarking,
"Well, it was really time that the poor old lady went." He didn't
believe in people living beyond seventy, Young Nicholas replied mildly
that the rule didn't seem to apply to the Forsytes. George said he
himself intended to commit suicide at sixty. Young Nicholas, smiling and
stroking a long chin, didn't think his father would like that theory;
he had made a lot of money since he was sixty. Well, seventy was the
outside limit; it was then time, George said, for them to go and leave
their money to their children. Soames, hitherto silent, here joined in;
he had not forgotten the remark about the 'undertaking,' and, lifting
his eyelids almost imperceptibly, said it was all very well for people
who never made money to talk. He himself intended to live as long as he
could. This was a hit at George, who was notoriously hard up.
Bosinney muttered abstractedly "Hear, hear!" and, George yawning, the
conversation dropped.
Upon arriving, the coffin was borne into the chapel, and, two by two,
the mourners filed in behind it. This guard of men, all attached to the
dead by the bond of kinship, was an impressive and singular sight in
the great city of London, with its overwhelming diversity of life, its
innumerable vocations, pleasures, duties, its terrible hardness, its
terrible call to individualism.
The family had gathered to triumph over all this, to give a show
of tenacious unity, to illustrate gloriously that law of property
underlying the growth of their tree, by which it had thriven and spread,
trunk and branches, the sap flowing through all, the full growth reached
at the appointed time. The spirit of the old woman lying in her last
sleep had called them to this demonstration. It was her final appeal to
that unity which had been their strength--it was her final triumph that
she had died while the tree was yet whole.